'...I have been having a lot of trouble with silly little Bloomsburys lately. They all think that it matters to me if they, and people like Desmond MacCarthy, like my poetry. It doesn't. I don't expect them to. They've civilised all their instincts away. They don't any longer know the difference between one object and another, - or one emotion and another. They've civilised their senses away, too. People who are purely 'intellectual' are an awful pest to artists. Gertrude Stein was telling me about Picasso, when he was a boy, nearly screaming with rage when the French version of the Bloomsburys were 'superior' to him. "Yes, yes," he said, "your taste and intellect is so wonderful. But who does the work? Stupid, tasteless people like me!"
How irritating it is, though. In the 1890s, 'superior' people discovered that ugliness is beauty. But the modern intellectual is a bigger fool than that. He has discovered that everything is ugly, - including beauty.'
from a letter to Allanah Harper, c1928 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell
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